Otis Gibson

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This article is about the Methodist missionary. For the West Indian cricketer, see Ottis Gibson.
The Reverend

Otis Gibson
Born(1826-12-08)December 8, 1826
Moira, New York
DiedJanuary 25, 1889(1889-01-25) (aged 62)
San Francisco, California
SpouseEliza Chamberlain
Children3

Otis Gibson (simplified Chinese: 基顺; traditional Chinese: 基順; Pinyin: Jīshùn; Foochow Romanized: Gĭ-sông; December 8, 1826 – January 25, 1889) was a Methodist pastor, best known for his missionary work to the Chinese in Fuzhou, China and in San Francisco, California.

Life[edit]

Early life[edit]

Eliza Gibson (1830–1916)

Born on a farm in Moira, New York, Otis Gibson had five brothers and one sister. He was converted at the age of 13 after the sudden death of his brother. When he was 19, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the early 1850s he attended Dickinson College. Later he became a teacher and went to a Quaker settlement in Maryland to teach, where he met his wife-to-be Eliza Chamberlain.[1]

Shortly before he graduated from college, Otis Gibson decided to go into the ministry and was appointed as a missionary to Fuzhou. He graduated in June 1854 with a D.D. and was licensed to preach on 4 November the same year. A few months before he and Eliza were sent to China, they got married in a Methodist Camp Meeting.[1]

Missionary work in China[edit]

Otis Gibson's ordination was given in 1854, but his scheduled sail had to be postponed till spring the next year because the recording secretary forgot to record the recommendation. On April 3, 1855 Gibson and wife set sail from New York Harbor on a clipper ship bound for Shanghai. On that day Gibson wrote, "Believing that God ordered our course, we feel content and satisfied that all is for the best."[1] Finally they reached Fuzhou on August 13, 1855,[2] following Gibson's teacher Erastus Wentworth with whom he got acquainted at Dickinson College.

Ting Ang, the first Methodist convert in China

In 1856, Otis Gibson and his Methodist co-laborers established two churches in the city, namely, Church of the True God [zh] and Church of Heavenly Peace, which were the first two Methodist churches built in East Asia. On December 26, 1856, Gibson purchased a place in the South bank of River Min and established there in 1859 a commodious wooden Western-style boarding school for laymen and ministers.[3] In the 1860s Gibson also helped in the translation work of the Bible and other Christian books into the local Fuzhou dialect.[2][4][5]

On June 14, 1857, Otis Gibson and Robert S. Maclay baptized their first convert, a native tradesman named Ting Ang (陈安).[5] Some weeks later he and Maclay made an unannounced visit to Ting Ang's house and found no sign of idols.[2]

During his tenure in China, Gibson also started the Methodist mission in Yanping (part of Nanping) in 1864. There Gibson succeeded in renting a small house for use as a chapel, but he was faced with strong opposition. Soon afterwards, he went back with Eliza to the United States, and his work in Yanping was continued by Nathan Sites and other Methodist missionaries.[2]

Life back in America[edit]

Chinese Mission House (1880s), 916 Washington Street in San Francisco's Chinatown. Established 1870 by Rev. Otis T. Gibson as the "Chinese Mission Institute".

Due to his wife Eliza's failing health, Otis Gibson left China with her in 1865 and returned to Moira, New York as a pastor.[6] In 1868 he was assigned to San Francisco, California as superintendent of the Methodist Church's "Chinese Domestic Mission" designed to minister to the swelling number of Chinese immigrants in area of the California Conference.[7] There he learned the Cantonese dialect and opened many missions and churches, including San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Salinas, and in the gold fields in the foothills of California, and he also wrote a Chinese-English Dictionary and translated the New Testament into Cantonese.[1] Gibson and his wife had instituted on August 10, 1870 the Women's Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast, enlisting area Methodist women to organize the rescue and protection of exploited Chinese women of the slave trade.[7] By the end of 1870, Rev. Gibson had erected the building of the "Chinese Mission Institute" on Washington Street in San Francisco's Chinatown.[8] In October 1871, Gibson baptized his first convert in America, a young Chinese prostitute named Jin Ho.[1][9][10][11]

Jin Ho's tombstone in the Chinese Christian Cemetery of San Francisco

In his later life, Otis Gibson made untiring and courageous efforts in behalf of the poor and the wronged of the Chinese on the Pacific Coast.[12] In his landmark work The Chinese in America (唐人在金山, ISBN 0-405-11272-6) which was published in 1877, Gibson concluded his polemic against the anti-Chinese arguments with a noble restatement of the American ideal:

The doors of our country are open equally... We have room for all. Ours is the "land of the free, and the home of the brave." The oppressed and down-trodden from all nations may alike find shelter here, and under the benign influences of our free institutions, and of our exalted faith, with the blessing of Almighty God, these different nationalities and varying civilizations shall, in time, blend into one harmonious whole, illustrating to a wondering world the common Fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of man.

Otis Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic.[13]

While attending a preachers meeting in 1884 Gibson was stricken with paralysis. He died in San Francisco after a long illness on January 25, 1889, at the home of his son.[1] His funeral service was attended by Chinese, Japanese, and American friends, and he was buried at the Odd Fellows cemetery.[14]

Family life[edit]

Otis Gibson and Eliza had two sons while in China. One died in infancy.[1] The other son, William F. Gibson, became an attorney; represented in 1885 a Chinese couple in San Francisco who filed a landmark lawsuit against the school superintendent for barring their American-born daughter from attending public school;[15] and died in 1902 at age 46.[16] Only daughter was Myra Alice Gibson.[17]

Legacy[edit]

Otis Gibson started in 1868 the first Methodist ministry to the Chinese in America with a mission in San Francisco. The great 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed Gibson's Washington Street building that housed the Chinese Mission, along with most of San Francisco Chinatown. In 1911, after five years of displacement and fund raising,[18] the Chinese Methodist Church was rebuilt on the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets.[19]

Otis Gibson was also the first pastor to the Japanese on the Pacific coast. When the first Japanese church in America was dedicated in San Francisco in 1894, he was memorialized in the west window stain glass of the Japanese Church on Pine Street.[20]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Otis Gibson's family letters
  2. ^ a b c d Carlson, Ellsworth C. (1974), The Foochow Missionaries 1847-1880 ISBN 978-0-674-30735-3
  3. ^ 近代福州基督教建筑文化初探 (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 26 February 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  4. ^ "仓山区志 (Cangshan District Records)" (in Chinese). Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  5. ^ a b 卫理公会来华宣教年表 (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 7 July 2011. Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  6. ^ Thomson, Edward (1870), Our Oriental Missions, Vol. 1
  7. ^ a b "Otis Gibson (1826 - 1889)". Archived from the original on 21 November 2008. Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  8. ^ "Chinese Mission Institute". cdnc.ucr.edu. Daily Alta California, Volume 22, Number 7550, 22 November 1870. Retrieved 22 October 2022. The building of the Chinese Mission Institute of the Methodist Episcopal Church, under the management of the Rev. O. Gibson, is ... located on Washington street, between Powell and Stockton. The building, which is a three-story frame, is plain, substantial, and ample for the purposes for which it is intended. This institution, springing up quietly and unostentatiously in this city, in spite of the strong and bitter prejudices against the Chinese, created by certain political demagogues, is a credit to our city, to civilization, and to the church under whose auspices it is being reared.
  9. ^ "The Early Chinese Pioneers". Archived from the original on 28 August 2009. Retrieved 16 August 2009.
  10. ^ Yung, Judy (1995), Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco ISBN 978-0-520-08867-2
  11. ^ Staley, Jeffrey L. (July 2008), "Clothed and in Her Right Mind": Mark 5:1-20 and Postcolonial Discourse Archived 2010-06-14 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ Johnston, Nathan Robinson (1898), Looking Back from the Sunset Land (People worth Knowing)
  13. ^ Daniels, Roger (1990): Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 ISBN 978-0-295-97018-9
  14. ^ "IMPRESSIVE SERVICES. All Classes Attend the Funeral of Rev. Otis Gibson". cdnc.ucr.edu. Daily Alta California, Volume LXXX, Number 29, 29 January 1889. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  15. ^ Paddison, Joshua (2012). American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p. 179-180. ISBN 9780520289055.
  16. ^ "DIED. Gibson, William F." cdnc.ucr.edu. San Francisco Call, Volume 87, Number 116, 26 March 1902. Retrieved 2 November 2022. In this city, March 25, 1902, William F. Gibson, beloved husband of Carolina S. Gibson, son of Mrs. E. C. Gibson and the late Rev. Otis Gibson, D.D., and brother of Mrs. G. H. Martin, aged 46 years. ...funeral tomorrow ... from his late residence, 912 Dolores street, between Twenty-second and Twenty-third.
  17. ^ "MARRIED. MARTIN-GIBSON". cdnc.ucr.edu. Daily Alta California, Volume 84, Number 7, 7 January 1891. Retrieved 2 November 2022. In this city, January 5, by the Rev. H. B. Heacock: George Handel Martin of Port Costa and Myra Alice Gibson, only daughter of Otis Gibson, D. D.
  18. ^ "ORIENTAL MISSION WORK TO BENEFIT". cdnc.ucr.edu. San Francisco Call, Volume 105, Number 177, 26 May 1909. Retrieved 2 November 2022. ...a musicale by Chinese performers, to collect money for the rebuilding of the church at Washington and Stockton streets, San Francisco, which has been in ruins since the fire.
  19. ^ "150TH ANNIVERSARY (2018)". Chinese United Methodist Church of San Francisco. Retrieved 22 October 2022. In 1868, Reverend Dr. Otis Gibson and his wife, Eliza, founded the Church with the mission to protect the Chinese from the violence of racial prejudice. They tried to not only guide the Chinese people spiritually but also to teach them English. In 1906, the great earthquake destroyed the Church building. In 1911, after five years of displacement, the Church was rebuilt at the corner of Washington and Stockton Streets.
  20. ^ "JAPANESE CHURCH, Opening of the First in America". cdnc.ucr.edu. San Francisco Call, Volume 77, Number 3, 3 December 1894. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
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